OC Journalist Wins Appeal of Santa Barbara News-Press Lawsuit

On Friday, the California Court of Appeal issued a ruling in the a libel lawsuit filed against Susan Paterno, director of Chapman University's journalism program, by Wendy McCaw the loony-tunes owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press. The ruling found that McCaw had failed to show any reason why Paterno should be deposed, thus sending the lawsuit back to the trial judge, where Paterno will ask for it to be dismissed.

Paterno had profiled McCaw's bizarre tenure as publisher of the paper for a 2006 American Journalism Review story, which quoted numerous employees talking about what a nutball McCaw is. (50 employees of the paper have resigned since McCaw began acting like a petty dictator, behavior that first surfaced when she went nuts over the paper publishing Rob Lowe's home address in a story).

McCaw claimed that Paterno's story contained 33 libelous statements, but the court ruled that the allegations against her were "provably" false.* "It is ironic that [the News-Press], itself a newspaper publisher, seeks to weaken legal protections that are intended to secure the role of the press in a free society," the court concluded.

You can read Gustavo Arellano's previous coverage of McCaw's loony war against Paterno here.

*Actually, what I meant to say was that the court ruled that Paterno's allegations about McCaw were not provably false. Oops. See comments below for thanks and praises.

Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is managing editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).